PHANTOM DEEP
by Hank Pym III
Summary: Wolverine awakes one day with a horrifying memory he cannot shake. As his fellow X-Men at the Xavier Institute (Gambit, Rogue, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, Beast and Jubilee, pre-vampire) start to fall apart around him, he searches for an answer to what must be a curse. *note: the first two chapters are basically a prologue. If space combat isn't your thing, skip to chapter 3.*
1. Ch 1 - Logan

Logan's left leg was gone.

When he thought back on the nightmare, that was the earliest moment he could remember; looking down at his leg, and not seeing it.

There was more to the nightmare, he knew, but that's where his memory started. Whatever happened before it, whatever caused his dismemberment, was lost. Trying to search further back in the fight, all he could find was an endless black wall, turning in on itself.

That isn't to say that he didn't know what happened to his leg; he had a pretty good idea, in fact. He wasn't Hank McCoy, but he wasn't no dummy, either.

In that very first image, the first frame his eyes had recorded, he was sitting up after being knocked on his back. He was looking up at a pair of giant red electrode eyes; a sentinel, its "face" shredded in several places, where Wolverine recognized his own trademark handiwork: a parallel set of three claw marks.

As Logan sat up, taking in his surroundings, he saw the giant metal knuckles of the Sentinel's fist lodged in a crater in the ground, the dust still settling from a mighty blow. The Sentinel had tried to squash Wolverine like a bug. And he had barely missed. The fist, huge as it was, was so close on the cement floor in front of him that Wolverine could see the rivets holding its armor plates in place.

The sentinel hadn't really missed, technically. Logan had jumped backward; he could tell by his position relative to it. He must have seen the blow coming and had dodged the downward hammering fist of the giant robot killing machine. But it didn't miss. Not quite.

As the servos fired inside the metal workings of the sentinel, and the hydraulic pumps hissed, dragging the dozen-ton fist out of the crater, dropping shards of broken cement click-clacking back onto the ground, Logan looked to see what was left of himself. And there it was, as the crater came into view: a red smear, shards of bone, and a glint of adamantium, sandwiched in between two skins of black rubber. His leg had been crushed below the knee.

Rubber?

It was the deep-space uniform. That was the other clue. Wherever he was, whatever was going on in this dream, it was in space. Or maybe just required some space travel to get there. Or maybe just chalk it up to the non-logic of dreams.

Except that it didn't feel like a dream.

Before his eyes, the shards of bone started to snap back into place, adhering to the adamantium that still held the shape of his skeleton, as it jutted out of the mashed red stump like a ghost of what used to be his fibula.

Muscle fibers crawled back into place, wrapping around the bones. Fresh skin cells bubbled up from the exposed tissue.

The sound came back. Wolverine hadn't realized that everything so far had been muted. The impact of the sentinel's attack must have punctured his eardrums, and only now had his healing factor sprung them back into place.

An alarm was ringing. Had been. Electronic, with a robotic voice speaking in an alien language. A few words, repeating over and over in between the blaring alert klaxon.

_Sounds like Shi'ar_, Logan thought. Not that he could understand it. But it definitely wasn't good.

Logan hopped to his feet, his left leg now back in form, with only the shredded, dangling rubber foot of the uniform left to suggest he had received what to most men would have been a permanent, disabling injury.

The sentinel was winding up for another punch. Logan ran between the steel behemoth's legs, not taking any chances this time, and for the first time in the chunk of nightmare that he retained, he took a good look around.

He was in a hangar. A burning starship was crashed into the far wall, its fuselage ripped open and the guts of its engines scattered in a trail behind it. Looked like a hard landing, or a failed takeoff. Then Logan saw it: another sentinel, pinned to the wall by the ship, ripped in half at the waist, its red eyes flickering as its OS tried to reboot. Sparks, smoke and hydraulic fluid poured freely from a gaping hole at the steel beast's "mouth".

The fight had been going on for a while. Hours, maybe. Bodies of Shi'ar soldiers littered the floor, piling up along the walls, slicks of blood on the floor marking where the footsteps of the sentinels had bulldozed the fallen Shi'ar into heaps.

Orange sirens on the ceiling of the hangar spun slow, creating a dull strobe of light. But the fire from the crashed starship outweighed it, lighting up the whole place in a pulsing glow.

From across the hangar, there was a frantic, muffled pounding. Like someone trapped. But he didn't have a moment to think about what it might be.

"TARGET SIGHTED. EXTERMINATE."

Logan knew the sentinel hadn't given up on killing him. They never did. Not until you were dead. But it helped that they reminded you so often.

*SNIKT*

"Your move, bub."

The sentinel swung wide this time, scraping its forearm along the floor, trailing a broad shower of sparks. It was trying to crash into Wolverine like hitting a baseball, but by the time the sentinel's arm –as wide around as a Boeing 747 – came to him, he was flipping high in the air, upside down, both sets of claws pointing at the floor.

The sentinel's own momentum carried it through six razor-sharp claws, dicing its thick metal hide, and as Logan felt his adamantium blades catch the gears inside, he shifted his weight, dragging them along the rest of the arm, stretching the cut all the way to the floor.

When he landed, so did the sentinel's severed hand.

"Fair trade, bub. How's _your_ healing factor?"

As the sentinel tried to stand again, it faltered and reared back, the sudden loss of so much tonnage throwing off its balance. Logan saw one massive steel foot raise from the cement floor of the hangar, trying to compensate, but then the other started to tip as well.

Logan charged at the lower foot, the sentinel's remaining center of balance, and threw his shoulder forward, tackling it full-force. A final nudge, to dictate the path of an already falling tree.

The sentinel fell backward into the wrecked starship, rupturing its remaining fuel tank and exposing its contents to the inferno, and within seconds the starship, the sentinel, and half-sentinel pinned to the wall were all obliterated in a massive explosion, tinged green by the exotic fuel in the starship's tanks.

BAM BAM BAM BAM!

As thunderclap of the blast faded, Logan heard again the muffled pounding. It was coming from a corridor at the far end of the hangar. Someone was definitely trapped over there. He just hoped it wasn't whoever had called in the sentinels.

Hogan rushed across the hangar. From the burning wreckage, a distorted sentinel voice: "TARGET….zzzzIGHTED. zzzzINATE. *pop*"

"Yeah, heard it before bub."

As Logan neared the door, there was the pounding again, and he saw, through the blast-proof square of glass installed in the steel electronic door, the hand as it smacked against it. The glove it wore, torn and bloodied, was unmistakably X-men blue.

BAM BAM BAM BAM!

Wolverine broke into a sprint, dragging his adamantium-weighted body as fast as it could go. Just as he reached the door, he could hear a voice screaming. Just barely.

"LOGAN! HELP!"

Scott's voice.

Logan looked through the glass. It was an airlock, just a small room between two larger ones. Cyclops looked like he had been set on fire at some point, with half of his deep-space X-Men uniform melted onto his skin. He was hunched over, in obvious pain; shattered ribs, Logan guessed, and _he_ would know from experience.

On the floor were three dead bodies: two Shi'ar shoulders, blasted apart from what must have been Cyclops's eye blasts – they were kinetically based and thus left no burns, another injury Wolverine was well-familiar with – and the third body looked to be a black woman, face-down in a pool of blood, wearing a shredded X-Men deep-space uniform.

Perhaps worst of all, Scott's eyepiece had been ripped off. He was squeezing his eyes closed with all his might, letting out only a few tears as he howled for help. He had been trapped in this room, blind, for who knows how long.

He pounded on the door again, unable to see Wolverine standing just feet away.

BAM BAM BAM BAM!

"LOGAN!"

Wolverine tapped the glass back, and saw that Scott heard it.

"Stand back, Bub!"

*SNIKT*

Wolverine slammed his claws into the door, punching right through the solid steel and feeling his knuckles crash into it, burying his blades to the hilt. As sharp as they were, it took some power to drag them into an arc and create a hold big enough to step through, but he did it.

As he entered the room, Cyclops suddenly fell to his knees, gasping desperately. An airlock – by its design being airtight – did not take long to suffocate in, and Scott had almost proved it.

"Logan! I was starting to think you were dead!"

Cyclops was blind at the moment, and couldn't detect scents like Wolverine could, but apparently he recognized the sound of his old frienemy doing what he did best.

"Back 'atcha, Slim."

Logan helped Scott up from the floor, and saw the bodies again. Especially the one in the X-Men uniform.

"Tell me that's not…"

"Storm. They tried to take us hostage. She fought back and they…"

Gritting his teeth, Wolverine suddenly saw red. He grabbed Scott by his hair and shoved him against the wall of the airlock.

"Why didn't you help her, boy scout!?"

"BECAUSE I COULDN'T SEE!" Scott pointed at his face, his eyes still shut tight with obvious effort. "When I heard the shots, I opened up, but… it was too late."

Wolverine looked down at her still body. "Damn it all."

"We don't have time to grieve, Logan. Can you see the control panel next to the door?"

Cyclops was feeling along the wall the wall, next the second of the two doors that made up the airlock, leading deeper into the base. Logan spotted it.

"Yeah, it's right there. But maybe if we get her some first aid, it's not too late to—"

"Logan! The shield isn't up, do you understand?"

Logan's eyes went wide. Apparently he did understand. The "him" in the dream, _he_ understood what Scott Summers meant.

But now, as he tried to recover this memory, he couldn't summon the context. What shield? Where were they? When was this? He didn't know. Trying to remember just brought up more blackness. All he knew was that, at the time, it must have been of grave concern.

The Wolverine he saw in dream yelled back at Cyclops.

"What?! What about Hank? The transmitter, he was supposed to-"

"I don't know! I can't get Hank on radio, he was on the starship behind us, about to land, and those damn sentinels came out of nowhere, and…"

"It all just went to hell." Wolverine shook his head, finishing Cyclops's sentence for him.

"The missiles are within orbit, and the shield isn't up. Okay? That's what I know. That's what that voice is saying." Cyclops gestured at the ceiling, as the Shi'ar-language voice recording repeated its message yet again. He was too weak to say it with the appropriate emphasis to convey his fear, but Logan could smell it coming off him: Scott Summers, Cyclops, leader of the X-Men, was facing death. And he knew it.

This wasn't how Logan's dreams ever worked. He couldn't figure it out; why, walking through the dream in his head, could he _smell_ Cyclops's fear? He never dreamed like that. Never!

Cyclops stomped his feet.

"Logan! Look we can figure out what went wrong later, we don't have time! On the control panel, the key needs to be moved to the blue slot and turned left. See it?"

Scott handed Logan an electronic keycard, stained with blood. He followed the instructions.

"I heard the guards talking about it just before the shots, but I couldn't see the colors. Didn't want to get it wrong. That's how they got the drop on us in the first place…"

The door slid open. Logan gripped Scott by the arm and led him through the doorway.

"Ain't nobody getting the drop on us, Slim. I promise you that."

_What the hell is going on?! _was what Logan was really thinking, as he played the memory through. But he wasn't an active participant in the dream. He was just remembering it. He saw himself rush down the corridor with Scott, saying nothing, and could do nothing about it.

They rushed down the wide, steel hallway. Signs on the wall, written in Shi'ar, flashed red. There were no bullet holes or blood or bodies here; they, Cyclops and himself, must have been the first of the landing party to make it past the airlocks. Not a good sign.

They rounded a corner, and up ahead, two sets of steel doors whooshed open, one on each side of the corridor.

"Get yer blastin pants on, Cy."

A dozen Shi'ar troops marched out from each of the doors, weapons aimed at Cyclops and Wolverine. Wolverine planted his feet, blocking Cyclops from any incoming shots, and ducked down.

"Twelve O'Clock, Scott! Fire! Now!"

Cyclops opened his eyes, and a sudden column rich, red energy poured forth, filling the hallway. Logan felt the force of the blast as it passed just overhead, knocking down all 24 of the advancing Shi'Ar troops before a single of their return shots could hit a mark.

A few of the troops struggled to their feet, but Scott simply drifted his gaze over to them, bringing the terrible force of the beam onto them directly, squinting his eyes just so. He must have relished the sudden opportunity to see for a few moments, after having tamped down on his powers for so long.

"Nice work, bub. Let's move."

Cyclops shut his eyes again, and Logan again led him down the hallway.

"The control room is just up ahead," Scott said. Blind as he was, he apparently knew the layout of the base. _No surprise there_, Logan thought. _Boy-scout always did his homework_.


	2. Ch 2 - Wolverine

The control room was almost empty: two Shi'ar troops standing guard. As the heavy steel entrance door slid open, they both turned and saw Cyclops and Wolverine enter. Before they had time to be afraid, Logan was upon them.

"Two o'clock, Slim."

As Wolverine pummeled the Shi'ar he'd chosen, Cyclops let loose a crimson optic blast in the direction indicated, launching the other soldier off of his feet, and into the observation window that made up the entire far wall of the control room. Built to withstand a meteor strike, the window hardly made a sound as the unfortunate foot soldier ricocheted off of it, and fell limp.

"That all of them, Logan?"

"Yeah, Scott. That's it."

Scott was still working blind. It was a very high-tech base, but the chances of running across a ruby-quartz visor in the next few minutes before the galaxy was destroyed seemed slim. Wolverine was Scott's eyes from now on, and they didn't have time to hate it.

_Why do I know that galaxy will be destroyed if we fail, _Logan thought as he recalled the dream. That didn't fit, somehow. But the nightmare continued.

Wolverine looked around the control room, blocking out the sound of the alarm. Through the transparent observation wall, he could see a vast landing strip, built to accommodate ships much larger than those he had seen in the hanger. Bigger than the X-Men Blackbird he had arrived on.

_Wait_, he thought has he ran through the dream in his fractured mind, _did we fly the blackbird here?_

_How did I get here?_

_Where the heck is __here__, anyway?_

But you can't ask questions of your memories.

Outside, the sky was cloudy. Yellow clouds. Pulsing black. Not a planet Logan had ever been on, that he could recall.

The landing strip was as far wide across as a dozen football fields. But there were only a few scattered ships on it, and no troops that he could see. The base was in a disarray, still regrouping from a surprise attack, the left hand trying to coordinate with the right.

Cyclops, still clutching his broken ribs, caught his breath.

"Good. We still have a chance. Logan, there should be a large touchscreen showing missile trajectories somewhere on the control panel. See it?"

He spotted a screen that displayed a glowing circle, and a swarm of fast-moving dots approaching it.

"Scott, does it look like Missile Command?"

"What?!"

_Kid was probably in diapers when Atari came out,_ Logan thought.

"Nothing. Yeah, I got it Cy. The screen is right there."

"Okay. Okay, touch and slide up from the bottom of the screen, and a keyboard will pop up.

Logan did, and Scott was right: an array of squares with alien symbols on them, too many to match an English QWERTY keyboard, slid up into view. A grid of nonsense.

Logan couldn't help but look again at the screen a few feet further down the console, the one with the dots moving toward the giant globe. The missiles were closing in.

_No way is there time to get a shield up. We are all dead. _

Cyclops seemed so determined. But he was the brave leader in the face of certain doom. That was his job, to never give up. And besides: he couldn't see the screen.

"Okay I did it, but it's all Greek to me, Cy."

Cyclops positioned himself in front of the console, pushing Wolverine aside.

"Nevermind, just put my thumbs on the outer, bottom row."

Wolverine maneuvered Cyclops's thumbs as requested. Immediately upon touching the screen, Cyclops started typing away on the alien keys, his eyes still shut tight.

"Don't need to read it, I practiced this a dozen times before we left. Know it by heart."

_Boy-scout and his homework,_ Logan thought. _There's a reason he calls the shots_.

The screen flashed, eliciting a BEEP.

The speakers on the ceiling, which until now had been reciting alarm instructions in an alien voice, switched to another message, this time in English.

"MISSILE SHIELD ACTIVATED. INITIATING SHIELD PROCEDURE."

Machines in adjacent rooms hummed to life, rattling and whirring. The lights in the control room flickered. Through the observation window, Wolverine saw a curtain of blue energy rise from the pylons ringing the landing pad. Bolts of blue light shot into the sky, pooling just behind the clouds, creating a shimmering barrier. A force-field.

Wolverine looked again to the screen with the missile tracker. A shallow ring appeared around the globe representing the planet. As the dots met the ring, they halted; at the same time, he felt the thunder of the explosions out the window, in sync with the display. As the explosions reverberated behind the red clouds, the shockwaves caused the lights in the base to flicker. The screen with the missile readout fuzzed over.

"Way to save the day, boy-scout."

"I did the best I could, Logan."

Then, through the windowed observation wall, Logan saw it: a single warhead, punching through the cloud cover, screaming down like a meteor. Heading right for the base.

They were too late.

"…oh, no…."

Cyclops grabbed Wolverine on the back of his neck.

"What? What is it?"

"It's…one. One got through. The shield must have went up behind it!"

"You gotta stop that missile, Logan!"

"How!?"

An alert chirped over the speakers again, and the lights over the doors on each side of the control room flashed. A swarm of footsteps could be heard drawing closer, from both directions. Reinforcements, and lots of them.

"I DON'T KNOW, JUST DO IT! NOW!"

As the security doors on both wings of the control room flew open, and scores of heavily-armed Shi'ar troops stormed into the control room, Wolverine leapt up, planting his foot on top of the row of instrument consoles. He dove at the blast-proof observation window, his claws emerging to pierce the transparent barrier.

The "unbreakable" glass shattered, and Logan passed through a shower of diamond-sharp shards of Shi'iar security barrier, shredding his X-Men deep-space uniform, and drawing blood all about him.

But he hit the ground running. Full-tilt.

Logan sprinted across the vast landing pad, looking up at the approaching missile and extrapolating its eventual impact point: about a mile ahead. With perhaps three minutes to go.

_I can't run that fast_, he thought. _I'm not Magneto's brat kid. I got these short, stubby legs. I can't make it._

But he didn't slow down. He ran even harder, feeling the adamantium inside himself, stuck to his bones, slamming against his joints and their soft tissue. A reminder he wasn't born with the metal in him. It was an alien substance, always weighing him down.

Wolverine heard Scott scream, from behind him. He didn't slow down, only turned his head back to the shattered window leading to the control room, just in time to see Cyclops being overwhelmed by a mass of Shi'ar troops. He disappeared, screaming and firing madly from his eyes, under a frenzy of swinging energy blades.

_It's too late for him, _Logan thought._ If this missile hits, we're all dead anyway. Like Ororo. Too late._

Wolverine, playing this memory over in his head, couldn't figure it out: why did he remember this? He knew this never really happened.

He tried to brush it off, and to just stop thinking of this scene. Let it go.

But that was the problem.

His memory had been messed with enough in his life. Department K had stripped out what didn't help their Weapon X project, and dropped in fake memories wherever they thought it would result in a more efficient killer. He'd gotten used to that; not knowing what was real and what wasn't.

But the fake memories never operated quite like this one. That was part of what made those government implants so painful, emotionally: they felt so real, and he could remember every single thing about how he felt in those "fake" moments.

When Silver Fox kissed him in that cabin in Canada, and he told her he loved her and he waited to hear those same words back from her, in that voice he could never forget. It felt real every time he remembered it, lying awake at night and staring at the ceiling: his heart froze in his throat, and she smiled and kissed him back and told him she loved him, and she held him close, and as they undressed, out of the window of the cabin, just over her shoulder, he saw a perfect snowflake fall, swaying in the Canadian winter air, and he thought _this is my moment, in the blizzard of pain I finally found my single perfect snowflake. _He fell back on the bed with Silver Fox, and they made love under the harsh, wool blanket he had hung onto from World War I. The one that still held a hint of the mustard gas that had killed his friends. The one that kept him alive when he should have frozen to death in a trench, alone and forgotten.

_That_ moment. _That_ was fake. And _that_ hurt. It never happened, but he wanted it to be real. He felt like he couldn't go on living without that memory.

This was something different. He knew it was fake; it didn't make any sense otherwise. And he didn't want it to be real. But he couldn't get rid of it. Couldn't figure out where it came from.

But there was no way it was real. His friends aren't dead. And he had never been to this planet. He knew that.

_Still._

Logan sprinted along the massive landing pad, as energy blasts from the Shi'ar soldiers behind him, the ones that surely had murdered Cyclops by now, ricocheted and burst into flames around him.

_This is bigger than the X-Men. If that missile lands, the whole galaxy is toast,_ he heard himself think.

_Wait, how do I know that? _

_And if this is the Shi'ar base, then why are they trying to stop us from raising their own defense shields? Who is attacking them? Where are the missiles coming from? Why? NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE!_

Logan hardly had time to ask himself these questions. None to answer them.

He looked up and suddenly saw the massive interstellar missile diving down at the base, almost aiming right at him. Five seconds left, he knew.

The missile was so close he could recognize Skrull markings on the side of it, feel the air rushing away around him from its imminent force, smell the scorching fuel blasting from its engines. He could hear the sound of distilled horror accompanying its descent. The death-knell of the X-Men. Of countless civilizations erased in a moment.

Four seconds.

He didn't even know what he was going to do to stop a missile anyway. _I'm not Magneto_, he thought. _I'm not strong enough._

He wondered what happened to the other X-Men. Scott would never have abandoned Jean. Unless…

Two seconds.

_I'm sorry. I failed._

One second.

He popped his claws and slid under the tip of the missile, hoping for one last, desperate swing at it before it erased countless lives in a wave of incalculable heat and force. Maybe he could slice a key wire at the last moment. Maybe adamantium was the antidote for whatever cataclysm was about to take place.

Zero

...

Logan waited. Nothing happened.

The tip of the missile had stopped, one inch from of Logan's extended claws.

The missile hung in the air like an ornament, five feet from the ground. 100 feet long and dozens of tons of metal and fuel and Skrull explosives. Just frozen in space.

_What is this? Did I die?_

Logan couldn't move. He was stuck in the pose of what should have been his dying moment, bleeding head to toe with shards of glass stuck in every inch of his skin, howling at the sky, mid-swing as his claws were aimed at a hulking weapon of mass destruction, about to vaporize him.

But time hadn't stopped. Only physical matter had frozen.

Wolverine could see the missile in front of him, and he could think about it. He head himself wonder why he wasn't dead. He could hear the alarm still sounding in the base behind him. He could feel the heat pulsing from the missile's jet engines. He could smell the metallic exhaust.

But nothing moved. It was as if the whole planet was in stasis.

And then he saw it. Saw _him_.

A figure, descending from the sky, steady, his arms outstretched. Passing through the clouds, but not parting them like the missile had. Just passing right through.

As he got closer, Logan saw that he must be ten feet tall. The moonlight glinted off of his body; he's made of metal, or wearing some kind of armor.

Growing closer, Logan felt an uncontrollable urge to look away, to close his eyes. Anything to avoid seeing the figure as it ascended from the clouds. It was the same aura of doom that had surrounded the missile before it froze, but more pure. A distilled sense of utter doom, of _wrongness,_ surrounded the man.

But Logan couldn't look away, and couldn't close his eyes. He couldn't move at all, couldn't even feel his muscles flex in the attempt to fight whatever force held him in place. He had no choice but to see the man that descended toward him.

As the form came into view, Logan saw that he was entirely metal. No flesh. Plates of heavy steel interlocked along his torso. Circuit jutted out in a few places. A dull blue light hummed in the gaps between the plates. With heavy steel rivets and a circle in the face of the helmet, it was not unlike an old, steel diving suit, built for a planet with oceans unimaginably deep, far deeper than any light could ever reach.

The diver was just a few stories in the air above Logan, now. Looking down at him.

Logan wished he could stop the memory there. And in the memory, for a brief and shameful moment, he even wished that the bomb would go off and obliterate everything. Anything to prevent the figure from getting closer. Anything.

But the diver touched down. The heavy steel boots touched on the cement landing strip, and should have elicited a thundering impact, should have cracked the landing pad, but he didn't even make a sound. It was as if the man in the metal diving suit existed outside this dream, or on top of it.

He strode right over to Logan. Nearly twice Logan's height, and three times thicker. Calm, but exuding pure power.

As he peered directly into Wolverine's frozen eyes, inches from his face, Logan realized he might not even be wearing a helmet; it was impossible to tell. His face was like a lantern, its light only bright because it erased the light from all around it. There were no features, and no sound of breath, and no scent. Just a vortex of nothingness where a face should be.

Logan couldn't speak, his jaw and vocal cords not responding. But he thought with clarity and terror.

_Who are you?_

YOU KNOW MY NAME.

The voice answered back from within Logan's own mind, shaking the walls of his being. It was impossibly deep, and more force than sound. Like the force of gravity itself speaking to him.

_You set this all up._

YES. EVERYTHING. WHAT HAPPENED HERE WAS MY DESIGN.

_Why!?_

I GAVE YOU A CHANCE. AND I WATCHED YOU FAIL.

_But why go through the effort to-_

THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE FOR. NOT TO UNDERSTAND IT. TO BE IT.

Logan couldn't respond. There were no words. He knew he was about to die, and that there would be no explanation.

HOW DOES IT FEEL?

Logan felt the berserker rage build in him. Being unable to act on it, to release the desire to kill, exacerbated the feeling. He could barely think, and thinking was all he could do.

_Just go ahead kill me, coward. _

The lantern head tilted to one side, taking in what he had heard.

THIS IS ALREADY YOUR DYING MOMENT, LOGAN. THERE WILL BE NOTHING TO KILL.

Logan thought he recognized a hesitation in the diver's manner; it seemed the ominous figure had expectations of this exchange, and they were not being met.

_Then I want a name to tell the devil when I'm on my way back out of hell._

This time, the lantern didn't tilt. This had been expected. He almost seemed disappointed.

IF YOU HAVE ANY MEMORY, LOGAN, YOU WILL HAVE MY NAME.

With that, the lantern-headed shadow-form lifted from the surface of the planet, fading backward into into the vulgar clouds.

And then, the movement returned.

For a brief moment, Logan felt himself move. The momentum that had paused for so long picked back up, and his claws swung toward the descending missile for a faction of a second.

The tip of the missile crashed into the concrete under Logan's feet. As a split burst open in the fabric of being, and a black hole spread that erased billions of civilizations, Logan recognized the visitor. With his dying breath, Logan knew.

He knew the murderer's name.

THE DEEP.


	3. Ch 3 - Jean

Scott wasn't there when she woke up.

And it took a few moments for Jean to remember that he wasn't supposed to be there.

He had to wake up early that morning, to pick up a stock of chlorine for the pool, in time to for the party. He had mentioned that. It had been on the calendar. No surprise.

But he usually kissed her on his way out when he was the first one out of bed.

She'd pretend to be asleep when he did it, or sometimes she really would be asleep, but the kiss would wake her up. Or it would happen in her dream. Or she'd just wake up knowing it had happened. His scent on her.

Cyclops hadn't kissed her that morning.

That was the first time she could remember, when he had been home and not done it. But not really a surprise, either. It seemed they'd hit a rough patch lately, and she couldn't figure out why. It had bothered her, to be sure, but it felt routine. No big deal. Just a bump in the long road that any marriage travels. Scott Summers and Jean Grey had been through this before, worse probably, and it had always worked out.

Fortunately, this time, it was happening in a lull for the X-Men. The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants was broken. Master Mold had been destroyed; this time, apparently, for good. Magneto was hiding in his asteroid base, according to Charles. And all the mutant-hate groups were in disarray, after that nasty business with Mystique and the Brood. All in all, things were pretty quiet for once.

Jean Grey knew better than to expect that the peace would last. But knew well enough to count her blessings at the same time.

She sat up in bed, swinging her feet over the edge of the mattress and into her waiting slippers. She pulled the blinds open telekinetically, tugging invisibly on the cone at the end of the dangling set of strings.

The summer sun, waning in the season, was shining. Birds were chirping.

As she brushed her teeth in her distinctly unsexy pajamas—baggy flannel pants and one of Scott's old t-shirts—she listened to the creaks and cracks in the floorboards of the house—the Xavier Institute for Gifted Youngsters—and tried to identify each of them:

Beast swinging from one end of his room to another, a science text open in one foot.

Rogue's alarm clock radio, blasting country music that she didn't turn off until her favorite song came up, and played through.

Storm working out in the gym, getting in some cardio first thing, no matter what the day held.

Gambit making no noise at all, except maybe snoring; he was always the last to one up, being the last one in bed.

And something else. Maybe not even a sound or a presence, but something Jean could just _feel_.

Something wrong? Maybe.

Wrong in the sense it wasn't usually there, anyway.

"I wonder if Logan slept here last night?" she thought. Maybe that was it. He had a habit of disappearing now and then. It threw it off the whole balance of the house.

She could have cheated at all of this, of course. She could read the minds of everyone in the house in a matter of seconds, and know immediately who was doing what, without her ever moving an inch. That was easy for Jean Grey. But where was the challenge? Where was the fun?

…

Downstairs in the kitchen, Wolverine was making coffee.

Jean bounded down the steps in her slippers, flannel pants, and ratty t-shirt. Wearing no make-up. Her hair as a tangled, red nest.

"Hey, beautiful." He said it warmly and without a hint of irony. But he sounded tired.

"Good morning, Logan. Nice to see you, too."

The windows of the kitchen looked out onto the back patio. A pile of empty chlorine canisters rested next to the pool, which was now filled with water.

"Guess Cyclops got the pool back up and runnin'." Logan took a gallon of milk out of the refrigerator, and a cereal bowl out of the cupboard. "Just in time for the end of summer."

"It's for Jubilee. We wanted to let her have a pool party for her birthday."

Logan chuckled. "Right. Wasn't she the one who broke it in the first place?"

Jean sighed. "Yes. She said she wanted to find out if her energy blasts were strong enough to break concrete."

Logan poured cereal in the bowl, and milk. "Well, she found out."

"There was never any question." Logan and Jean turned to see Beast passing through the kitchen, his nose buried in a book. "If she had listened to my evaluations of her power levels, Jubilation would not have needed to execute further tests. The concrete used in residential swimming pools breaks under 3,000 pounds of force per square inch. Well within Mrs.'s Lee's power capacity, last measured at—"

Rogue 's laugh could be heard before she entered the room. "If you want a teenage girl to listen to you, Hank, you might want to keep it brief."

"Duly noted, Rogue."

She mussed his hair on her way past, into the kitchen. "Just a tip, blue." Rogue picked up a banana from the bowl on the counter, and smiled at Wolverine as she peeled it. "Howdy, Logan."

Wolverine snatched the banana from her hand, popped a claw, and cut a few slices into his cereal.

"Hey yourself, country."

Rogue took the banana back, playful, and opened a kitchen drawer, withdrawing a large envelope. "Speaking of the child, I got her a birthday card for everyone to sign!"

Jean took it from her and read it.

_You're 6,328 days old!_

She opened the card.

_That sounds even older than 17, doesn't it?!_

_Happy Birthday._

Rogue had already signed it, "Happy Birthday, J."

Jean added her signature, and handed the card off to Wolverine, but Gambit intercepted it, striding into the room in only a towel. "Gambit will take that. Think of me as your PR agent, 'chere!"

"Remy…" Rogue fumed.

Wolverine laughed through a mouthful of cereal. "Just don't charge it up, Cajun."

Gambit snickered at the card. "Sweet as candy, 'chere, but you know Jubilee is turning 18, yes? Not to mention the card here is a month early."

"No, a year and a month. I got it last year. But she was being such a bitch last summer, all I wanted to give her was a knuckle sandwich."

"No kidding." Jean remembered that summer. The kid was definitely still a kid then. Only then did Jean realize Jubilee might actually be maturing into a woman in the last year; there had no freakouts in a while. She'd been less angsty. Keeping to herself lately.

Wolverine popped his claw back in and signed the card. He almost dropped it when he saw Storm enter the room. And not because of the bikini she was wearing.

"Ororo!"

He hugged her, and Storm recoiled only slightly.

Jean felt a shift in him when he saw Storm. A realization. He was relieved, to put it lightly. Why?

"Logan! Good morning!"

"I'm so glad to see you, 'Ro."

Rogue furrowed her brow at Jean, signifying she didn't know what was going on either. If she wanted to, Jean could have read exactly what was going on in Logan's head. But she long ago told him she wouldn't do that, and she meant it. If Logan wanted to talk about it, he would.

Gambit leered at Storm's butt as Wolverine picked her up in his arms. "I'm even gladder to see you, princess."

"Easy, big fella," Gambit heard Rogue mutter as he set the card on the kitchen counter.

"Gambit didn't mean nothin' by it. Only dat 'chere has the right idea wit' her attire."

Gambit slung off his towel, revealing his speedo.

"Time to break in dat dippin' pool proper, I say."

Jean clucked her tongue. "Scott fixed it for Jubilee's birthday. We should wait."

"Nah, we should test it for her, right Doc?" Gambit nudged Beast as he passed back through the kitchen on the way to his basement lab. Beast nudged his glasses further back on his nose.

"Well, the chlorine should be diluted by now. And I have had to disable some of the Institute's security sensors during construction, as the vibrations of the jackhammers interfered with the sonic detection, so a sequence of tests might actually—"

Gambit interrupted Beast with a punch to the shoulder. "Just like I was saying. No harm when de birthday girl is out keepin' herself pretty."

Rogue smirked despite herself. "X-men pool party. Old-schoolers only. Before the kids come back in the Fall."

Gambit spanked Rogue on the (spandexed) ass on their way out the door, not waiting for a vote.

Jean's conscience perked up. "What about the chlorine?"

"It dissipates in water in a matter of seconds." Beast answered, finally putting down his book. "The proportions are what is relevant in that respect. And I submit that friend Cyclops is more than up to the task of measuring two variables of volumetric liquid."

"Okay, Hank, but what about Xavier?"

Beast was unbuttoning his Hawaiian shirt. "At the moment, he's in the middle of his speech at the genetics symposium in Holland. The doctor won't be back until the evening, truth be told." He shrugged on his way poolside.

Jean turned to Ororo, figuring her the most reasonable person left in the room. "Storm? Are we the adults here?"

"Perhaps so, Jean, but who would we be to fight the wind of popular opinion?" She slung a towel from the closet over her shoulder on her way out the door to the pool.

"I guess she's the authority there," Jean muttered to Wolverine, but he wasn't listening.

Jean ducked into the bathroom nearest the kitchen, and changed into her one-piece swimsuit. She saw the tide of X-men opinion: there was going to be a pool party, come hell or high water.

She listened to Wolverine through the door, alone in the kitchen. Using only her ears, not her powers.

He wasn't moving at all. Not even eating. Just staring into space, she figured. Not good.

She stepped out of the bathroom in her swimsuit, and that sight did seem to finally jar him into paying attention. He tried to compensate, looking away suddenly.

"You know, your cereal is getting soggy."

He dumped it out in the sink. "Think I'll make a steak instead."

Something was definitely wrong with him. She floated Jubilee's birthday card from the countertop over to herself, and scanned the signatures.

"Something on your mind, Logan?"

"Why don't you check?"

"It's not my place to invade your privacy, you know that."

"Then why ask, Jean?"

That hurt. He turned and headed the opposite direction of everyone else. Back up the stairs, to his room.

"Logan?"

"Yeah?"

"Who is 'The Deep'?"

…

Logan froze in his tracks.

"You say you respect my privacy and then you violate it anyway."

"I didn't. You signed it." She held out the card, and Logan turned around and took it from her, reading his own botched signature. He had spelled out THE DEEP in block letters. Jean must recognize his handwriting, he thought.

"Ah, damn it all." He scribbled out "THE DEEP" and wrote simply "Logan".

"The Deep? Who is that? Is that a person?"

"I…I don't know."

Jean stepped in closer to him, seeing that the thought caused him pain. She took his hand in hers.

"It's okay, Logan. You can tell me. What is it?"

"I mean it, Jean. I don't know. It's just a thing in my head. I can't tell if it was a dream I had, or, if it was, when I had it. Okay?" He stared into her eyes, trying to scare her off, but all she saw was desperation.

"What was in the dream, if it was that?"

He took his hand from hers, shaking his head. "You don't need to know things like that, hon'."

"I want to, Logan."

He stopped again at the stairs. Inhaled, uneasy. "It was a nightmare, I guess. A lot of people dead. People I care about."

"Who?"

"Storm. I think Beast, too. Maybe you. And then me, at the end. It's hard to read it, the memory is fuzzy, like a puzzle with pieces missing."

"Dreams are often like that, Logan. It's just how our brains operate, the—"

He turned around from the staircase, his voice raising.

"It wasn't a dream, Jean! I don't know how, but this was a real thing. Like a damn bug in my brain."

"Okay. That's alright, Logan. You're not in any danger now." Her hand on his shoulder, she felt him relax some, and led him back into the kitchen. "Just tell me what you remember. Tell me what happened."

"It was…on some kinda space station. Alien planet. Lots of military hardware…" Wolverine seemed to be dragging bits and pieces of the memory from his brain. "Shi'ar. It was at a Shi'ar base."

"Okay. What's the first thing you remember?"

He flinched. "Sentinels. I was almost killed by 'em and I was all by myself. I managed to get away. And…then the only person I could find alive was Cyclops."

Now she flinched. "Scott was there?"

"Yeah. We were the only ones. And he fought as brave as I've ever seen, but…"

"What?"

"He didn't make it, Jean. It was bad. Scott, he—"

Wolverine stopped. Jean waited on his next word, then turned to see why he had stopped: Cyclops loomed in the doorway. And he didn't look happy.

"I didn't make what?"

It didn't help that neither Jean or Logan would feign continuing the conversation. They just let the silence hang, twisting the knife Cyclops imagined in his back.

Wolverine cracked first. "Hey, slim. It was nothing. Just a dream I had, was sharing it with Jean."

"As long as it's just a dream." Scott pulled Jean close, with more force than she'd like, and kissed her on the cheek. She felt him eyeballing Wolverine as he did it. More for Logan's appreciation than hers.

"Not that kinda dream, bub."

"Forget it. Where is Beast? I need to talk to him about a project."

Jean motioned out the window, to the pool, where Beast was cannon-balling off of the diving board, with Rogue, Storm and Gambit cheering him on from the shallow end.

"Oh, great. Ruin the whole reason I fixed the pool. Jubilee will be thrilled." Cyclops headed for the door.

"Easy, Bub. She'll be alright. They're just having fun."

"Whatever." Cyclops huffed.

Jean and Wolverine followed him out to the pool, shrugging to each other. _What can you do?_

…

Gambit slung a can of beer at Wolverine, who caught it on reflex, and popped it open, also on reflex. He took a gulp and smiled at the sunshine, and his friends in the pool. At Jean.

She watched him from a deck chair, leaning back and applying sunscreen to her arms.

"Maybe the biggest man in the smallest package I've ever known," she thought. "He's lived through so much, and of all the places he could be, he chooses to be here with us."

_With me_, she tried to keep herself from thinking.

Cyclops stood somewhere behind her, not having changed his clothes. He surveyed the scene, arms crossed, jaw set. Barely trying to hide being pissed off at the whole situation.

Logan waited at the back of the diving board, while Storm bounced on the tip.

"No cheatin' with a gust of wind, 'chere! Remy is watching you!" Gambit shouted at Storm from the water.

Storm lept up from the diving board and performed a perfect flip, the sunlight glinting off of her wet skin, and slipped into the pool water with nary a splash.

"Excellent form, Ororo!" Beast applauded as she surfaced.

Wolverine stepped onto the diving board, and paced to the edge.

"Show her how a man does it, Logan!" Gambit shouted, opening another beer from the poolside cooler.

Wolverine hopped on the tip of the diving board, bouncing and building momentum. The X-men in the pool shouted and clapped for the epic dive about to be witnessed. He was a nimble man, and never one to let down a crowd waiting for a spectacle; anyone would grant him that.

But Jean saw his gaze drift up to the sky and freeze somewhere there. He stopped jumping, and the bounding of the diving board slowed. He was frozen, erect, looking in the sky in front of him.

Uncomfortable murmurs rose from the pool crowd.

In that moment, Jean felt the same pang of dread she had detected when scanning the house that morning. A hint of something just _new_ just coursing through the air. A change.

Jean sat up in her reclined chair, trying to see what Wolverine was looking at. She expected an incoming ship, or a fleet of sentinels. Something that would justify stunning a man like Logan. But all she saw was the natural scene; clouds, the pale moon, and a few birds.

A *SNIKT* broke the silence, as Wolverine popped his claws, seemingly without noticing. Never taking his eyes off whatever had stolen his attention in the sky above.

"You alright, Logan?" Gambit shouted.

And then he slipped. Wolverine's foot drifted off the wet diving board, and the rest of him followed. He sank, limp, into the pool.

The X-men nearest him gasped and went to help him, but Jean was already in midair, diving into the pool. She swam to the bottom, to the just-dried concrete floor her husband had patched the day before, and wrapped her arms around Logan.

"Adamantium skeleton. I almost forgot," she thought as she kicked back to the surface, dragging his diminutive body with her, barely able to carry the weight.

They gasped for air together, and Beast was the first one next to them.

"Mr. Logan, are you alright?"

"Yeah, peach-fuzz. I'm fine." Jean was relieved to hear Wolverine's voice.

Storm placed a hand on his shoulder. "Wolverine, maybe you should lie down for a spell. You do not look well, old friend."

"Nah, it's alright, 'Ro. Come on, you're all embarrassing me."

Gambit chuckled. "A few hundred years can sap even your grace, eh savage?"

Wolverine waved him off, and they all spread out, back to their fun. Relieved. Everyone except Jean.

She slicked his hair back from his face, and clutched his jaw.

"What was it, Logan?"

"Forget it, Jean." They kicked in place, keeping themselves afloat. "Just tired."

"Tell me, Logan. Don't shut me out."

He just looked at her, pain shimmering behind his eyes.

"It's The Deep, isn't it?" She said without knowing what she meant. Pretending.

Wolverine nodded, reluctant, his gaze drifting back over her shoulder to the sky.

"I'll tell you about it later."

"When?"

Wolverine spat water back into the pool, shaking off his trance. "Let's go get a drink tonight. Hash it out. Sound okay?"

"That sounds great, Logan. Anytime."

"Bring Scott along. He should know, too."

She smiled, finally letting go of the vague fear that maybe a disaster was just now happening. "Sure."

She took Wolverine's head in her hands and planted a kiss on his cheek. Then turned around to swim back to her edge of the pool and continue her tan, when she saw Cyclops.

Scott was standing at the edge of the pool, his fists balled and white-knuckled.

"Oh, dammit" she thought to herself. As she reached the edge, right in front of his feet, he didn't help her up from the pool.

"What happened, Jean?"

"Nothing. It's okay. He's fine."

"Yeah, I'll bet."

She rose to her feet, picking up the towel from her chair and drying off.

"Logan wants to go get a drink."

"Oh yeah?" His fists tightened even further.

"Yes, you know, get away for a bit. You should come. His idea."

She saw Cyclops think it over, his face never drifting away from a stern non-smile, his eyes masked by a pair of red shades.

"I'll pass. Have _fun_."

He turned back to the house.

"I love you." She said it quiet enough, to his back, that she thought he might not hear her. And he didn't reply. But she had saw him slow down for just half a moment on his way inside. Knew he had heard her. His only reply was a door slamming.

She stood still in that moment. Hating it. Not quite hating _him_, but as close to it as she'd ever been.

"Whoa, the pool is fixed?"

All the X-men turned to see Jubilee, standing pensive at the edge of the pool area, shopping bags in hand.

They were all frozen again, waiting for each other to speak. Embarrassed. Caught in the act. Gambit finished his beer and shouted "the water's fine, 'chere! Join us!"

Jubilee grinned and snapped a bubble of chewing gum, tossing off her yellow trenchcoat and setting her shopping bags down in the grass. She kept stripping, peeling off every layer until she was just in her bra and panties.

She dove into the pool, to the cheers of Beast and Wolverine and Gambit.

Jean caught Storm's eyeline, and they shrugged to each other. _What can you do?,_ indeed.

"Well, she _is_ a woman, now" Jean thought to herself. She hated feeling like a prude. It hadn't been so long since she was that age herself. But she decided then that she needed to have a talk with the girl; about how men show attention, and how to deal with it in a mature way. To explain the adult world to her.

To tell her to give Gambit a wide berth, at the very least. But that could wait.

Wolverine padded over to Jean, a towel around his neck.

"Alright, Mrs. Summers. Let's blow this popsicle stand." He had heard the door slam, and nodded to Cyclops's exit. "Where's he going?"

"He said he has a headache. Staying home."

"Oh." She saw Wolverine evaluating his social position. Never his strong suit. "Should we… you know. Still go?"

Jean compared in her mind the prospects of a relaxing drink with her old friend, or an angry silence at home with her husband, who was going to be mad at her either way. She smiled at Logan. "What do you think?"

He smiled back, his sharp teeth glinting, the first time all day that she had seen the fog over him lift for a moment. "I think you know better than to ask _me_ for advice on good behavior."


	4. Ch 4 - Phoenix

CHAPTER IV – PHOENIX

From the passenger seat, Jean could see Wolverine trying not to look at the moon, as he tooled his jeep down the winding hill roads that led from the Xavier Institute. The moon did seem to glow especially bright and big in the sky tonight, she noticed. Almost like it was hanging lower to earth than it always had.

Before long, she realized she had been staring too.

She put her feet up on the dash. The wind blowing through the open cab of the jeep also blew up the skirt of her dress, an unexpected rush of sensation that made her squeal.

She blushed, and giggled into her fist, with her other hand pushing her skirt back down, as she rolled over on her side to see Logan grinning just despite himself. A few shining teeth peering back from a crack in his wrinkled, stubbly face: a hint that he couldn't help but have fun in this world, no matter how hard he thought his heart was.

Wolverine coughed, swallowing his smile, and nodded at the sky. At the moon, Jean thought at first.

"That must be Chuck."

Then she heard it, what Wolverine must have heard long before he mentioned it: the whine of jet engines approaching and passing overhead. The silhouette of the Blackbird jet crossing through the sky. Charles was back from his lecture tour. In a few minutes he'd be rolling down the ramp of the Blackbird and onto the blacktop landing pad on the mansion's roof. Maybe he'd see the restored pool four stories below, illuminated by a row of lights installed along the walls of the deep end.

"Maybe he'll talk to Scott and fix whatever's making him such an asshole today," Jean thought to herself.

…

Logan took an exit off the freeway, long before hitting downtown. They were heading into the suburbs, and Jean was disappointed: she had dressed up, after all. A white spring dress with a sparse green pattern, a pearl necklace, and chunky green heels. Green nail wraps that matched her dress. She was particularly proud of those. Getting all "prettied up" had never came natural to her, even if she had never been quite a tomboy. More of a Joan of Arc, she liked to think - if her self-esteem were high enough on a given day.

She looked good, she knew, and she wanted to show off in front of the alpha males that flood downtown on the weekend nights. She knew, but resisted acknowledging to herself, that she wanted to make up for the negative attention her husband had been showing her.

But Logan was heading her off, pulling the jeep into a dusty neighborhood full of run-down ramblers and scotch-broom, the kind of area she would only visit if she had ran out of gas on the way to somewhere real.

"Logan? I thought we were…"

"I know. You think too much, Ginger."

Wolverine hung a left and parked on a gravel strip outside of a dive bar, one with an unlit neon sign, and with an array of beat-up pickup trucks and motorcycles parked in the front. A not-very-romantic couple were exiting, visibly drunk, and arguing about some petty domestic transgression. A man with a satchel of roses, intended for sale, sat asleep against a wooden post in front of Logan's chosen parking space.

"Wolvie?" She looked for him to respond. But he didn't. "You can't be serious."

Logan turned off the engine and lit a cigar, winking at Jean as he exited the Jeep. A wink that said he knew this was a somewhat unsettling surprise, and that he was enjoying watching her reaction pay out.

And yes, this wasn't Jean's kind of place. Everything about it screamed "Logan." But she felt oddly happy to be walking in the entrance, even as overdressed as she was. Because she liked Logan. She liked him a lot.

And so, she liked being granted this opportunity to pretend she wasn't having a good time.

…

A mug of cold beer appeared before Jean Grey, just as her bottom met the barstool she had just brushed crumbs from. Logan hadn't ordered, either, but he had a matching mug in front of him too. He blew the foam off the top and took a swig that nearly killed the glass, and then belched. Then she saw him blush – more of an expression than an actual bloom on the cheek (_never seen that on Logan_, she thought, _maybe the healing factor prevents it?_) – but he seemed to be faking embarrassment anyway.

She saw as a friend of Logan's – some slurring trucker in a vest with a fur collar – slapped him on the back and motioned at her. Wolvie pretended to look over his shoulder at her, muttered something, and his friend exploded in good-natured laughter: "so that's her!" she overheard. Logan laughed too, and so did the rest of the bar patrons, even though if Jean didn't hear half of the joke, they surely hadn't either.

Jean joined anyway, and took a long drink of beer.

Logan was having fun. More fun than Jean had seen him having in a long time. He actually seemed like a real person for once. And as she pondered what it was that was finally loosening the stick up his ass, Jean realized it was her that was being real. That was what was fueling Wolvie's chuckles: seeing the good, married, off-limits matriarch of the Xavier Academy let her hair down, be bad, slam a beer, and just be a beautiful woman for once, without the weight of mutant-kind weighing her super-mind down.

She finished her beer and let out a belch of her own. Fur-collar-drunk drifted over, guffawing, and slapped her on the back. She spilled some beer on her dress. Nobody cared.

…

As closing time approached, the patrons drifted out of the bar, Fur Collar included, and both Jean and Logan drooped in their posture as the beers piled up. She was getting giggly, and he was getting sentimental.

Logan lit a cigar. "That reminds me of a time. You know which one?"

"What?" Jean didn't notice that she was covering her mouth as she spoke, nervous about her good cheer. Not sure what to do with it.

"That time back in Siberia, we were bailing Colossus out of trouble with his old buddies, they had a gang or something…"

"Oh yeah! The… alley cats? Street cats? Something like that."

"Yeah, they were the Street Wolves."

"Yeah!" Jean slapped the bar, rattling all the empty glasses, then immediately went back to covering her face and blushing. "Damn it, I'm sorry."

Logan laughed. "Who are you apologizing to?"

"I don't know. I'm sorry."

"Stop that!"

Now it was Logan that was laughing. And Jean thought she heard him speak over his own laughter: _I have to have her._

But he didn't say anything. He couldn't have said that. She was watching his face, and he was laughing his ass off. You can't talk when you're laughing like that. That's the whole fun of it.

_God, she is such a beautiful person. What am I going to do?_

That time, she recognized it. The voice was the one she heard when she had tried to read Logan's mind in the past. She was hearing what he was only thinking to himself.

But she wasn't trying to pluck those private thoughts from his head. That wouldn't be right, and she knew that.

It was the alcohol.

It was lowering her inhibitions, smoothing out her thoughts, and one of those thoughts was the one that kept her wide-band scanning of thoughts turned to "off". Logan's brain was like a busted fire hydrant to her; the information kept bursting through the cracks, unfiltered, and she couldn't stop it if she wanted to.

And she wasn't really sure if she wanted to.

Jean had to bring him back to the conversation. "So the Main Street Wolves, what about them?"

Wolverine wiped a tear from his eye. "Oh, so Colossus had that friend, real hard case. Kaspar."

"Oh! I remember him. He smelled."

"You're tellin' me… anyway so i guess he had been in some prison out there, since before Colossus found his powers."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, cuz he shows up one night. I was at the bar with Peter, he was having a hard time. Found out the girl he left behind when he went to America didn't wait up for him."

Jean sighed. "Poor guy."

"Yeah." Logan slowly spun his nearly-empty glass.

"So?"

"Eh?"

"What did Kaspar do?"

"Oh! Right. Well it was just me and metalhead at the bar. Drinking vodka, me tryin' ta cheer him up, but you know that ain't my strongest skill."

Jean held her hand out,pal down, and wobbled it: the "so-so" motion.

"Right. So Kaspar busts in, drunker than both of us put together, and yellin' and hollerin' about mutants being freaks or mistakes or whatever. He started the Street Wolves, dammit, and if a bunch of genetic defects wanted to roll into town and bust up his gang, god dammit, he was going to show them the real power. Pulls up a stool next to Colossus, hopin' for a sympathetic ear."

"Oh, god."

"Yeah, _now_ it's 'poor guy,' eh?"

"Piotr didn't kill him, did he?"

"Ah, would that just break your heart?"

"Logan..."

"Nah, he didn't kill him. He was surprisingly calm, given all that vodka. Guess girl trouble does that to guys like him. Lucky for anyone nearby. Anyway, he just says "Comrade Kaspar, do not disparage others just because you do not understand them. It's-"

Jean fell off of her stool, laughing so hard she barely produced a sound.

"What?!"

"Do it! Do it again!" she managed get out from the floor of the bar.

"Do what?"

"The russian voice! You sound Just like him, it's priceless!"

Logan had barely realized he was doing an impression. And he didn't have the heart to tell Jean he was actually doing the voice he associated with Omega Red.

No matter. She was enjoying it too much.

"Well, Kaspar tells him to blow it out his ass. Says he'll humble him in combat if he keeps it up. Basically what you'd expect. Then..."

Logan chuckled, then pulled his hair back, flattening it, and put on a stern, Russian expression. He fixed his posture military-straight. He bellowed at the top of his lungs, exagerrating the accent to the hilt:

"I HAFF WARNED YOU KASPAR, NO MORE VILL I WARN YOU AGYNE!"

That practically killed her, as she fell back down just as she was struggling to her feet. She was trying to cover her face again, too. But there was no hiding a laugh when it was that hard.

"Just for you, Jean."

"That is too good…"

"Yeah. That's not even the funny part. The funny part was when he gave Kaspar the first punch, and seeing Kaspar's eyes bug out when his fist hit metal."

"Poor guy."

Jean struggled to her feet, still stifling giggles at Wolverine's impression of her friend, and wiping away a tear. Finally she managed to regain her composure, putting a hand on Logan's shoulder to commend him for the performance.

She left it there. Tapped her green fingernails on his shoulder.

"You know, Logan, I think we both forgot the whole reason we came out here. You were going to tell me about your dream."

Logan put his hand over hers, on his shoulder, and squeezed her lightly, looking into her eyes.

"Yeah. I think I think I needed this more anyway."

"Yeah. This was fun. You can still tell me, though."

"I know, Jean."

And that was the last thing Logan would remember: the hand of the woman he was afraid to love, curled under his, as he committed in his mind to tell her everything.

…

Logan woke up naked, flat on his back. Looking down at his feet. Unsure if he had just opened his eyes or if he had just started to see again after a blackout.

His feet were covered in blood.

He reached down to touch them, to see if it was really blood, and as his hand entered his field of view, he saw his claws were out. And they were covered in blood too.

*SNIKT*

He popped the claws back into his hand. The hand was drenched in blood too.

He sat up.

He wasn't at the bar anymore. He wasn't sure where he was; it was a swath of dirt, uneven and craggy. As he took in his surroundings, he could see the yellow scoop of a backhoe hanging some yards to his left, and tire tracks in the dirt, crisscrossing around him.

Logan stood up, and immediately fell down.

Drunk? Maybe. He couldn't tell. Couldn't remember how had gotten there. Or what had happened to his clothes. So yes, probably drunk, he thought.

"What…where…" he thought, and realized he had spoken to the blanked and black sky.

He stood again, bracing himself on a mound of dirt, and waited for the world to stop spinning.

It was a construction site. A foreman's trailer was planted a few yards away, ringed with jackhammers, ropes, racks of hardhats, and assorted tools. It was the dead of night, though, and he was all alone. The night was hauntingly still. Not even crickets interrupted his fear.

"Jean!" he called. No reply.

Climbing out of a shallow depression in the dirt of the construction site, he felt the sting of wounds all over his naked body as they met the cold night air.

"What the hell…" he muttered, this time intentionally aloud. He approached the foreman's trailer, which was adjacent to the fence surrounding the work site.

Gazing at the portable's window, he jumped as he met his own reflection: his face had deep scratches across it, the claw-work of someone's fingernails who had been fighting with ferocity.

As the reality sank in, so did the fear.

"Jean! Where are you?!"

Some birds took flight from the power lines overhead, but that was all. He could smell her, though. She had to be close.

Logan uncoiled a garden hose that was bolted to the exterior of the foreman's portable, and cranked on the spigot, dousing himself with icy water, hoisting the nozzle of the hose high over his head to wash away all the blood.

He was thankful to see that as the blood washed away, there remained dozens of open cuts all over his body; _maybe this is all *my* blood_, he dared to wonder.

He turned off the spigot. Even before the water was done cascading down his lacerated skin, he could see the wounds closing. His healing factor going into effect.

But as the blood washed away, so did Jean's scent.

Logan started to get his head together. _Figure out the when and where first, mutie. Then we can track down Jean._ But as he tossed the hose aside, he felt a hitch in the healed skin on his shoulder-blade.

Wolverine reached to check his back, and felt a speck left buried in his freshly healed skin. He grimaced as she seesawed the matter back and forth, dislodged it, and brought it forward for inspect.

It was a fingernail.

Painted green.


	5. Ch 5 - Jubilee

CHAPTER V – JUBILEE

"I'd like a pack of Marlboro Lights, please."

The words hung in the air, mingling with the new-car smell.

_No, no that's horrible. _Jubilee shook her head, trying to erase the sound of her performance.

_Deep breath. Be cool. Try again._

She watched herself in the rearview mirror this time, trying to look hard.

"Pack'a smokes."

_Okay, that might work..._

_Wait, won't he ask what kind? That's, like, how people order stuff in movies. It sounds fake._

"Cuz it _is fake, _you spazz..."

Jubilee sighed and bent the mirror back away from her. It had been awhile since she'd broken any laws, and she was rusty. But time was running out to break this one. In a few days she could buy all the cigarettes she wanted, and be in no trouble at all.

So where was the fun in that?

It was kind of a mission, then. With a timer running out. She woke up early this morning, before the sun had even come up. She had woken up thinking about it, about her birthday, and resenting that feeling she had, where she just wished she could postpone it, just for a couple more months_. I'm not grown up yet, I swear I'll do it, just not yet, I don't know why…_

So going back to bed was impossible, with her brain tossing and turning like that. Instead, she got in her car and drove into town. On a mission. To break a law.

So that's what she did, she strolled right in the automatic doors (_BING!) _of the 7-11 nearest the Xavier Institute, just confident as all hell, walked right up the counter, and when the cashier turned around, she looked him right in the eye and...

...chickened out.

She just stood there, saying nothing, until it got too awkward and she knew she had to come up with some reason she was standing there - _because what the hell is wrong with this girl, he must be thinking - _so finally she mumbled something about needing the bathroom key, then took it and went to the bathroom and hyperventilated for a minute or two.

And all through that minute, or two, all she could think was _I used to be cooler than this!_

So she splashed some cold water on her face, shook it off, got herself together and vowed to try again.

So she walked out of that bathroom, just as confident as all hell, and walked right out of that 7-11 with her head held high, through the automatic doors (_BING!) _and back to her car.

And then the cashier chased after her, out of his store and into the parking lot, and banged on her driver's side window right as she was about to drive off, and she panicked as she rolled down the window, not remembering later what the hell she was saying with her mouth while her brain was telling her _how does he know, I didnt even say the word cigarette, is everyone in this freaking town a psychic? No offense, some of my best friends are psychics…_

But it turned out he just wanted the bathroom key back, so she shoved it through the cracked window with a shriek right as she sped away, thinking again and even deeper this this time: _I used to be cooler than this._

And so then Jubilee just drove around for awhile, until she got her nerve back, looping a few miles further from the institute than she had planned that early morning, and then pulled into the first quick-stop she saw, just on the outskirts of downtown, in a neighborhood checkered with construction yards and warehouses.

Just as confident as all hell.

Now she was sitting alone in her car in the parking space next to the gas station, just out of the cashiers view, practicing her lines. No mistaskes this time.

It was a cute car. Volkswagen. Emerald green, brand new, and a gift: everyone at the institue had chipped in for her imminent birthday: what was unsaid among both parties was that a car, of course, is a 16th birthday present, and thus this was 2 years late. She didnt question it. She knew she had been grating on everyone that year, the not-so-sweet sixteen, and well into the next one too. Broke the swimming pool at one point, that was bad.

She had straightened out this year, and was finally being accepted as a peer. No more temper tantrums, or sneaking out and missing the Danger Room drills the next morning. Still, she wondered if the refrain in her head was a cpoincidence: _I used to be cooler than this._

_"_Hey, pal. Can i get a pack of marbs?"

Say, that didnt sound too bad. She crooked the mirror back around to see her reflection, and tried again.

"Hey, pal. Pack of Marbs?" and she saw her lips crack a curled smile of pride at how damn genuine it sounded.

_I got sounded good._

She put her hand on the door handle of the VW. She told her hand to lift it up, so that she could tell her legs to swing out, and walk through those doors, just as confident as all hell.

But wait.

_I __sound__ like a smoker. I still look like me!_

Jubilee looked at herself in the mirror, and tried to pretend her eyes were that of the cashier in the gas station just a few yards away.

Something wasn't right.

She took off her visor-style sunglasses. Popper the collar of her yellow trenchcoat. Looked at the mirror again. Frowned. Put the glasses back on.

"Hey, pal. Pack of Marbs?"

Shook her head. Took the jacket off. Glasses back on. Try again.

_I got this. There's no reason to wait._

…_right? Maybe there's a reason to wait._

_I'll just wait, if there's a reason to wait. Wait, yeah. Just a little. Wait and then I go. Confident. Cool._

She looked through the windows of the 7-11 and saw a customer. Some guy. She couldn't do this with an audience.

_Okay, I'll just wait until he leaves. I'm not afraid, I'm just waiting until the time is right. Once that guy leaves…_

…

Across the street, Tyrone popped the magazine out of the TEC-9. Counted the bullets. Imagined where they'd go, whose life they would take, if he had to pull the trigger. Counted the years in jail, in his mind.

But he reminded himself not to say anything about that. The ghetto axiom never to show weakness.

He thrust the magazine back into the TEC-9, and turned to his cohort in the driver's seat.

"Clickety-clack, we good homie!"

Jay, in the driver's seat, turned to him, disapproving. "Man, stow the gat! You trying to get us locked up before we even pulled the job?"

Jay snatched the TEC-9 out of his hands, and tucked it in the pocket of his sweatshirt.

"Oh, yeah. I uh…I'll do the shotgun then."

They had been parked in the green Monte Carlo across the street from the quick-stop for what seemed like an hour now, but he knew the adrenaline in his veins had been distorting time – adrenaline he shouldn't have been feeling at all if he was _really_ hardcore like he said he was, because this was a textbook holdup after all. But he knew he had been bragging about jobs that never happened for weeks now, and so _now_ it was time to prove how hard he was, or duck out.

Now or never. Time to be a criminal, or slink off to community college. Like a punk.

And he wasn't no punk.

So he wasn't put off by the cameras in the 7-11 pointed at the doors, or the height measurement marks pasted right next to the doorways, so that they would have a wanted poster all ready to go if you did what he was about to do, or the shotgun that might be under the counter.

Or even the teenage girl that he saw parked next to the 7-11, sitting in her VW, and who seemed to be talking to herself in her rearview mirror, or something. Taking her sunglasses on and off. Whatever.

There was a customer in the store right now, that was the only reason they hadn't sprung yet. Once he left, it was on.

It was _on_.

Tyrone took a deep breath, steadying himself. He turned to Jay.

"No shooting, right? In and out?"

"Yeah, straight up, dog. Ain't gonna be the first time this dude got robbed, it's business as usual. We just getting' paid!"

Tyrone sighed.

"No blasting. We just get the money, we don't hurt nobody. Promise?"

Jay gestured with the TEC-9, masked behind his pocket, and flashed Tyrone a grin.

"No promises."

Tyrone leaned against the dash, trying to fill up his lungs with oxygen. It seemed like he hadn't been able to draw a breath all morning. He was all tight inside. Like he knew something horrible was about to happen.

Sometimes, your worst fears aren't bad enough.

Then the guy in the quick-stop left. He got in his car and drove off. The coast was clear.

Except for that girl in the VW. Talking to herself.

Jay elbowed Tyrone.

"Let's make some paper, dog!"

And then Jay opened his door and stepped out of the car. And Tyrone did the same, following him. Trying to get tough enough in his head to handle what he was about to do.

But as they approached the entrance of the 7-11, guns in hand, ready to shoot anyone who stood in their way, he saw that teenage girl step out of her VW, heading into the quick-stop ahead of them. Not even seeing them. Just the back of a yellow trench coat in front of them, passing through the automatic doors.

But it was now or never. And he wasn't no punk.

…

The cashier was turned away when she walked in, checking the count on his cash drawer. Perfect.

Jubilee heard the doors slide open (_BING!)_, and felt her body tense up. Apprehensive. She told her nerves to shut up.

_What's the worst that could happen? He probably sells five-hundred packs of smokes a day. This will be business as usual. He won't even remember you ten minutes after you leave. You're freaking out over nothing. Just be cool, stroll up to the counter, and say it._

So she did just that.

Jubilee expected her hand to tremble as she took it from her pocket and ran it through her hair, feigning nonchalance. But it didn't shake at all.

_I got this. Now just say your line. And be cool._

She stopped at the counter.

The cashier turned around.

He looked right at her.

She opened her mouth to say the words. Just as confident as all hell.

"Hey, pal. Pack of Marbs?"

And the cashier… stopped.

His eyes went wide. Like the back-side of white china dinner plates. The opposite of business as usual.

_Damn! How does he know?!_

Then she saw the barrel of the shotgun, as it passed over her shoulder. Pointed right into the cashier's saucer eyes.

…

Tyrone wasn't supposed to be the voice this time, but he spoke first. A reflex.

"All the money, now!"

He was so scared, his own voice made him tense up. He had practiced this in the mirror, but it was different in practice. And there was this girl, here. He felt bad about that. She was probably piss-scared: how old could she be, fifteen? Sixteen, tops?

The cashier was scared, that was for sure. He was piling money onto the counter in stacks, haphazard, with bills floating away in the breeze from the rotating fan next to him.

…

Jubilee had frozen, but just for a few moments. Just long enough to process that she was actually almost _glad_ the place was getting robbed.

Now this, she could deal with.

Better than the guy with the shotgun could deal with it, that was for sure. The barrel was quivering and quaking next to her, ready to go off at any sudden jolt. Obvious that the man at the other end of the barrel was even more scared than the cashier.

"Have you like _never_ done this before?" she said over her shoulder.

She rolled her eyes as she said it, then remembered that she had settled for "sunglasses-off." Gunman saw her mean expression. Oh well.

"Shut up, bitch!"

She blew a gum bubble. Snapped it.

"Whatever."

Then Jubilee snapped her fingers, and a brilliant, pink trail of spark and flame zipped out from the sound, jumping from her fingerless-gloved hand and arcing back, over her shoulder.

Down the barrel of the shotgun.

The pink spark-ball, a ground-bloom-flower but much, much hotter, corkscrewed down the barrel in the blink of an eye – which, as it happened, was exactly what the man holding the shotgun was doing in that moment: blinking, which is what most people do when they flinch, which is what most people would do if some crazy girl who talks to herself started shooting firecrackers out of her hands right before them – like a skateboarder looping down a pipe.

Tyrone pulled the trigger on the shotgun. The cashier wet himself.

Fortunately for the cashier, the spark hit the shell that was resting in the breech of the shotgun before the hammer did, detonating its load an instant before it would have been sent out the business end.

The effect of this, the igniting force entering the wrong end of the shotgun, contacting the wrong end of the shell, was that the buckshot exploded outward, unfocused. The blast sheared the barrel from the wooden stock of the gun, splitting it in half, and instantly scorching Tyrone's hands as he held the site of the chemical reaction.

Jay, still training his pistol on the cashier, had turned his head to see this, and reacted with more disgust than shock. "Man, who is this bitch, one o'them mutant freaks?!"

Tyrone couldn't reply, as he was occupied tossing the pink ball of sparks back and forth, from one hand to the other like a hot potato, yelping with pain each time, higher and higher in pitch.

Jay swung the TEC-9 over to Jubilee's head, taking aim just in time to see his own helping of sparks, arcing over the gun's sights and straight into his face.

Jay pulled the trigger. The gun went off. Again and again, emptying the clip into the blazing wall of white light in front of him that was all he could see, and he hoped it was where that mutant girl's smug face was.

All was quiet.

_I got her. Split her damn head open._

Jay's vision slowly returned. He braced himself for the gore he was about to behold.

…but was staring at bullet-holes, spread wildly on the wall.

No, not the wall. The ceiling. Jay realized he had fallen backward into a display of mesquite BBQ potato chips before opening fire.

The mutant girl leaned over him, entering his field of view.

"Y'know, if I was on the roof, you might have really frightened me just now."

Another bubble-gum bubble. Another snap. Jay flinched, dropping the empty TEC-9, but there was no light-show this time. Just bubble gum popping.

"Tyrone! Get the—" but as Jay turned over on his mattress of crinkling potato chip bags, he heard the _bing!_ of a customer leaving, the doors whooshing open, and saw Tyrone sprinting away across the street, damn near getting creamed by a passing dump-truck in the process.

"Tyrone!"

He got up and chased after him, tripping over the shotgun's charred walnut stock on the floor, and taking out a rack of Slim-Jims as he tried to regain his balance on his way out the door. _Bing!_

"Thank you, come again!" Jubilee said it in a mock Indian accent, then winced, looking over to the cashier. "Um, sorry."

…

Jubilee tucked the cigarettes into her trench-coat pocket, switching them out for her keys. He hadn't carded her, but that was no surprise. How could he? He didn't even charge her. He was her new #1 fan. _Totally doesn't count_.

She covered her sigh with the purr of the motor starting.

She shuffled around on her iPod at a red light, plugged into the car's stereo with a white cord. A playlist of her favorite songs. None of them sounded any good. Just bland noise, blurring together. Boring.

This was the effect of adrenaline wearing off.

_Hey, that was pretty fun! It's been too long since we had any action. Who needs illegal cigarette purchases when you can get shot at?_

She laughed to herself. Then choked on it when she saw the rearview mirror: a green Monte Carlo, growing fast on the horizon, weaving around traffic.

They were back, and they had picked up some friends. The two guys from the 7-11 were up front (the one with the un-burned hands driving, naturally) and there were two big guys in back, leaning out their windows, guns at the ready.

_Ah, crap._

She popped a quick left turn, darting through oncoming traffic, and floored it. They did the same, making her fight to keep her lead.

Jubilee wound her VW through a grocery store parking lot, honking her horn as she sped past pedestrians and cars, clearing a path. Emerged on the other side, back into the streets, then right down an alley.

She checked the mirror. Still there. And now they were gaining on her.

A burning-rubber drift back onto the main road, and then she ducked toward the highway. Heading back to the institute.

And then she saw it. Or rather, saw him: a naked man, walking up the middle of the street, away from her._ Whoa, what the heck?_

She couldn't slow down, of course. Not with the hooptie full of gangbangers just two blocks or so behind her, gaining fast. She was just going to drive around the naked guy.

The kinda _short_ naked guy, she noticed. And he wasn't even walking, so much as just…_shambling_ up the road. A bum, maybe. Recovering from a drunken jag. Probably he didn't even know he was walking in the middle of the street. Thinks it's a sidewalk.

A short, naked, _hairy _guy. The details were becoming clearer as she got near, about to pass him.

"It can be…"

She passed him, a blur. She whipped her head back and saw him.

_Logan._

She slammed on the breaks, swinging unwillingly into a 180, facing him. She got out of the car before it even had come to a rest.

Wolverine hadn't seemed to notice her skid, or the burnt rubber and smoke. He just kept shambling forward, muttering something to himself, tugging at his own head of hair. Jubilee rushed up to him. "Logan!"

Finally he stopped, looked up at her. Blinking. Recognizing her, but seemingly unsure if she was real or a hallucination.

"Logan, what the hell are you doing? Why are you…" – and she looked him and down, trying to convey, trying not to stare – "…you know!"

She was waiting for him to speak when the Monto Carlo skidded to a stop, just behind them. This time, Wolverine noticed.

Metal clunking of doors opening, and guns being cocked. "Bitch, you chose the wrong ni-"

_SNIK'T_

All four of the gangbangers froze, as the nude Wolverine turned to them, teeth bared. They didn't even seem to notice the claws. The look on his face was scary enough: the expression of a man who had maybe just killed somebody, and had an appetite for more. And it spooked them all so bad in that moment, they were scared like kindergarteners caught fighting.

They all got back in the car, slow, at the same time, but not saying anything about it to each other. Not having to. The Monte Carlo turned around and drove off, five under the speed limit.

Wolverine turned back to Jubilee. She saw the look on his face in the split second before he put it away, and she jumped.

"Hey! Hey!"

He popped the claws back in. Some of the haze in his eyes seemed to go with them.

"Jubilee?"

"Yeah! Logan, what the hell are you doing?"

"Where's Jean?"

"What? What are you talking about?"

"Was she at home?"

"I don't know, I was on my way home. From, uh, I was… well, forget that. Why are you walking in the middle of the street? What happened to your clothes?"

He almost looked like he was going to cry.

"I don't know. I don't know where she is…"

And that's when Jubilee started to realize just how serious the situation was. This wasn't going to be a funny story. Something very bad had happened.

She scrambled to think of what to do, not used to being the responsible one in any group._ Maybe he's hurt_, she thought, and looked him over, this time too scared to be bashful.

But he appeared unharmed. He just kept rubbing the back of his shoulder, as if reaching for a knife stuck in his back. Scratching there.

She took off her trench-coat and wrapped it around him, like a blanket, and led him to the VW.

"Let's go back to the institute, okay? I'll drive. Maybe Jean's there, at home. Maybe everything's okay, okay?"

But she knew that neither of those _maybes_ were going to prove true.

Sometimes, your worst fears aren't bad enough.

…


End file.
